Dreamed I was incarnated in some sort of game where I had to figure something out. This game was just like real life. I was out walking Earthbear, except he was wearing a sweater.

For some reason, I had to kill someone in this game in order to extract their heart, as this might yield the information I was looking for. The murder itself wasn’t in the dream, but I knew I was guilty of it, and soon the police were all around.

I ran, finding myself to be extremely nimble, able to climb structures and vault over obstacles. But there were too many police, and soon I was trapped on an electrical tower.

The only option for escape was to kill myself, knowing that I’d be incarnated into the game again, out of custody, and able to resume my search. I climbed up to one of the circuit boxes, with the aim of opening it and inserting a metal rod into the current.

A policeman climbed up and offered to help, but instead of helping he knocked me backwards into a waiting net. I was hauled off to a holding tank with a bunch of other criminals.

There, I launched into a sermon about how everyone was responsible for whatever truth they knew. Not truth as some external object, but an inner knowing that was easy to deny. Even though this truth was easy to deny, everyone would suffer insofar as they denied it.

This, I declared, was the truth that Pontius Pilate seemed to mock when he asked Jesus, “What is truth?”
The Empire was built exactly on the denial of this truth, so that the essential choice of every person was between their empire and their soul.

All of the other prisoners, and even the guards, were moved and agitated by this speech. The man next to me asked, “When I write this story, what is this sermon called?”

I replied, “The Sermon of the Cell.”